Capitalism kills

What day is it today? Yes, it's Friday but also 'World Day Against Death Penalty'. In fact, the year is peppered with such days. Many of them focus on specific problems endemic to capitalism, such as racial discrimination (21 March), various readily preventable poverty-related diseases (eg malaria, 25 April), child labour (12 June), refugees (20 June), torture, corruption, etc. Pure, misleading, myopic reformism day after day. This is not to say that Socialists consider such issues irrelevant. We are, for example, against capital punishment yet will not join such single issue campaigns. Those for or against are equally short-sighted. The vast majority of people who kill are not executed: a soldier is a hero if he does so in uniform, but labeled a murderer if he takes lives when dressed in civilian clothes. Similarly, the food producers who, with their profits in mind, destroy vast amounts of edible material in a world where millions starve to death are in no danger of being strung up, electrocuted, gassed, shot or given a lethal injection. Every execution shows that the death penalty is no deterrent. "Neither the reintroduction of capital punishment, nor its continued absence from the options available to courts, will lead to a murder-free society. Crime has roots in the social relationships of this system and will pass when this society is ended. The argument...is imbued with, and distorted by, a morass of emotions. In its proper context, we should see that in innumerable ways, all the time, capitalism kills; it is a social system unfit for human habitation." (Socialist Standard, August 1983)